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Astronomical

Absurdly well known videogame trivia

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One of Minecraft's music disks' spectrogram image has "12418" and a Steve face written on it. 12 is hex code for C. C418 is the game's music maker. Steve is the male protagonist of Minecraft. 

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Early on in development the 3DO Army Men series of games was initially envisioned to be a WW2 series, but doing so would’ve resulted in having the need for multiple versions of the game due to censorship laws of the time in various parts of the world. So they became green nation vs tan nation and were simply plastic soldiers and not human beings tied to real world locations and militaries. 
 

Funnily enough, it shows how pointless wars can be. They’re literally fighting only because the color of plastic is different from each other. 

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Doom / Doom 2 have tracks based on actual songs.

 

Minecraft's Creeper came from a borked pig model.

 

Earthbound is called Mother in Japan.

 

Atari dumped 700,000 game cartridges into a landfill in New Mexico in 1983.

 

Megaman X5's robot masters are all Guns N' Roses references in the localized version.

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8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Pong was the first commonly available video game. (No one said this yet..?!)

 

Is that really the reason? I never would have guessed that, though putting drinks on your console is pretty much begging to kill it when you inevitably do a careless move and spill it!

Yeah apparently the NES was popular for placing drinks on top of it (I guess because it was one of the first major consoles and people are stupid) so to stop repairs and refunds, they came up with the new design. 

I'm having quite a bit of trouble trying to balance my tea cup on the Switch though :/

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3 hours ago, Pyborg said:

Counter Strike was originally a mod for the original Half-Life.

Less commonly known: I stopped playing it when I got kicked from a match that I was invited to by a friend from middle school because my ping was too high.

 

Sorry my family can't afford one of those highfalutin 56k modems, I'll just go back to TFC with my measly 33.3k. After I spent all damn day downloading Counter Strike.

 

God the internet used to suck. Still does, but for different reasons.

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17 hours ago, Jello said:

Less commonly known: I stopped playing it when I got kicked from a match that I was invited to by a friend from middle school because my ping was too high.

I can sorta relate. Team Fortress 2 is my favorite game ever, but I can't play it because I get kicked from every match I join and I don't know why. My ping isn't terrible, nor my internet. The only theory I have was that my IP was leaked somehow and some degenerate(s) keeps DDos-ing me.

 

 

 

also, yes the internet is kinda garbage now :/

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Kirby is named after the lawyer John Kirby who defended Nintendo in the Universal Studios lawsuit over Donkey Kong/King Kong. He won. It turned out Universal didn't own King Kong either.

 

The blood code in the Mega Drive version of Mortal Kombat (A,B,A,C,A,B,B) is the name of an album by Genesis (yageddit?).

 

The "SEGA" jingle played on startup in the original Sonic game takes up half of the total cartridge space.

 

The original Gran Turismo was in development as early as 1993 when the Nintendo/Sony deal was still on the table. Had things been different, GT might have been a Nintendo SuperDisc title and one of the Big N's killer IPs. Probably would have had fewer microtransactions these days, too.

 

Psygnosis weren't provided with a PS2 devkit when work began on WipEout Fusion. The initial sizzle-reel footage was created on a PC and all work had to be scrapped when it turned out that the PS2' architecture was completely incompatible with what they'd produced. The game suffered as a result and up until last week was widely regarded the worst game in the series...

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RayForce was originally meant to be titled Layer Section for the arcades as well. Shame, Layer Section sounds cooler.

 

Rick Taylor from Splatterhouse 1 resembles Jason Voorhees.

 

Crash Bandicoot was almost called Willy Wombat.

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The original Donkey Kong arcade cabinet referred to Mario as "Jumpman" and the damsel-in-distress as "Pauline."

 

Nintendo has an official Legend of Zelda timeline, but it makes virtually no sense and can mostly be ignored.

 

Philips was able to create its infamous CD-i Mario games due to a licensing deal with Nintendo aimed at creating a CD addon for the Super Nintendo. Nintendo's efforts on that front also indirectly led to Sony's creation of the Playstation.

 

Did I set my barometer for "absurdly well known" too high?

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Here's some obvious but still interesting ones:
 

- Due to color limitations, Megaman uses two different sprites to be rendered on the NES. The first consists of the body and the second is the face. On some levels you can see just his face flickering. 

- On the same topic, flickering happens on the NES because of a very strict limit of sprites that can appear on a horizontal line. So when that happens they start to cycle very fast to ensure the visibility of all sprites on the screen.

- Generally Sega Genesis games can only show 61 colors on screen, however it's possible to increase that number by using the highlight\shadow feature or reloading the palettes on the mid of the screen (like what Sonic does on underwater sections). 

- Backgrounds on Atari 2600 games are always mirrored on the x-axis, unless there's something hacky going on. Some games break that symmetry by using sprites as part of the scenery (like Adventure who use them as walls to create one sided rooms). 

- SNES is not capable of scaling sprites (Mode 7 can only change backgrounds). That's why some boss arenas doesn't have background (i.e. Super Metroid or Super Mario World), the enemies are drawn as bgs - hence creating the illusion of sprites getting bigger or squashed.

- The idea of using backgrounds in unsual ways happens on the NES to show large enemies that could not be drawn as sprites. IIRC that's the case of the dragon on Megaman 2 - his whole body is a background and only the eyes and wings are actual sprites.

- The Genesis is more than capable of replicating Mode 7 effects. However it need to be coded on software, which means it would take more time and knowledge to be made. Some developers preferred to scrap these effects in order to release their games in time.

- The iconic white fog on Silent Hill only existed because of the limited draw distance on the Playstation hardware. In my opinion one of the best and most creative use of limits to build a visual identity.

- Doom and many other DOS games are made on 350x200 but are meant to be seen as 350x240, with stretched rectangular pixels (almost all source-ports do that by default). That happens due to a lack of options on video cards at the time, who doesn't had a proper square resolution for CRTs. The SNES had a similar quirk - but stretching on horizontal instead.

- Dithering on some games are made to create entirely new colors or even translucency effects - but only when seen on a CRT composite monitor. The display is used to blend pixels together so LCD monitors cannot show these effects. Again, that was a very common technique on Sega Genesis and can be seen on the waterfall of Green Hill, which is meant to be fully transparent.

Edited by Noiser

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